A functional approach to monitor and recognize patterns of daily traffic profiles

Functional Data Analysis (FDA) is a collection of statistical techniques for the analysis of information on curves or functions. This paper presents a new methodology for analyzing the daily traffic flow profiles based on the employment of FDA. A daily traffic profile corresponds to a single datum rather than a large set of traffic counts. This insight provides ideal information for strategic decision-making regarding road expansion, control, and other long-term decisions. Using Functional Principal Component Analysis the data are projected into a low dimensional space: the space of the first functional principal components. Each curve is represented by their vector of scores on this basis.…